Feeling slightly guilty … but only slightly. One of my Twitter followers is a schoolboy; we’re an eclectic lot here! His latest tweet, a minute or so after inquiring about the Genius function in iTunes, told us all that he was thanking the deity for headphones. They block out his ‘stupid teacher.’ Yikes! In class,
Continue reading ...This is a comment ‘upgraded’ to a post. The original was in response to an inquiry from a colleague in the US. She asked for some tips on using a class blog. My response got long, and by the end I thought it probably could do with a dust-off and a reshaping into a stand-alone
Continue reading ...Image via Wikipedia Nearly at the end now, and days 29-31 have been about wrapping up the 31 Day Comment Challenge. The final 3 days focus on the learnings: to prepare a commenting guide for students, to consider how learnings from this commenting project could change one’s teaching practices, and finally … to reflect on
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The focus of this post concerns the changing nature of our ‘classrooms’. School’s in for the year and we’ve hit the ground running as they say; at least we’re there on the ground in traditional classrooms, in workshops, and online. The electronic revolution is nibbling insistently if not biting hard yet … at least as far as e-learning is concerned in my neck of the woods.
Last night I worked in a virtual classroom in a live chat with a very small group of students … hope this grows! Memo to self: strategise getting them on board! They still need help, as do my colleagues, to make sense of this Web 2.0 world. I’ve also been working in a traditional classroom in the stand and deliver mode this week, but even there I’m more interested in getting the students to do the learning, rather than to stroke my own ego by giving them the goods culled and mediated through my own experience.
Continue reading ...The more work you put into the preparatory phase of a journey … and barring disasters or unforseen circumstances … the smoother the ride. Right? Knowing where you’re going and how to get there is also useful. When it comes to prepping course materials for delivery to students, it’s helpful to switch thinking from what
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photo credit: Greg Melia
Next Monday is day 1 of teaching for a new academic year… or should the emphasis be on learning! Change is in the air. It’s a change in thinking, a sort of ‘can-do’ feeling that is beginning to nudge colleagues into giving this e-learning stuff a go. I’ve experienced this several times this week alone at my place. Now change at institutional level can be notoriously slow in uptake, and never more so than in academe. Tried and true ways that ‘work’ are hung on to perhaps long past their shelf freshness date, and for all sorts of good reasons. One of the prime excuses is time-poverty, and free-thinking academics are notorious for resisting the kind of change that comes from above … administrative mandates being one of the most resisted. But I digress a little.
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When I was a kid, and it rolled around to back to school time, I used to love stocking up on stationery and getting my new textbooks. The trip to the newsagent (stationery supplier) in January was like Christmas all over again. I remember sniffing the new pages … exercise books provided an entirely different olfactory experience than did text books. I’d marvel over the contents … would all of this unfamiliar knowledge be all mine before the year was up? Then it came to the writing implement of choice for this new academic year … the colour of ink and the heft in the hand had to be right. I remember when those new fangled yellow Biro pens came in, but I loved the smell of Quink ink and the feel of a fountain-pen nib on paper, and still do. A whiff of Clag paste still jolts me back to days of grade school innocence. When I got to university, I experienced the same thrill browsing the shelves in the bookstore. By then it was agonising over the right folder or ‘student portfolio’ to capture lecture notes and to store class handouts in. Now I am all grown up, I still enjoy trawling the shelves at the local office supplies warehouse. But my, how they have grown too; is there no limit to the number and kind of pens these days? I walked the aisles of my local Officeworks a couple of days ago, checking out the latest in the office supplies department. There is more choice than ever, but what you only get a hint of … the tip of the iceberg as it were … is the relentless incursion of the digital world into the quiet backwaters of prepping for a class.
Continue reading ...The UK-based Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies is worth a visit, and Centre Director Jane Farmer’s ‘Learning Tip of the Day’ definitely worth subscribing to. Right now there’s a call out for educators to contribute their current favourite top-10 tools. The lists get boiled down at year’s end, and the top 100 for 2008
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Hello, my name is Dramagirl, and I’m a webaholic …
Several of my latest posts here have focused on the flood of social networking sites I’ve been attracted to during the past few months. In fact, an entire theme has developed with these often apologetic posts. I’ve been a bit whiny really, using the sad excuse that such play aka experimentation is all grist to
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